Machining Sponsorship for FRC Teams

[Cory]

Originally Posted by SamM

We attempted to ask the question, but I'm not sure the response answers the question any better than the manual currently does.

https://frc-qa.firstinspires.org/qa/327

It seems it is up to the team to determine if the employees doing the work are 'members' of the team, so in theory you could pay full cost for the machining but not include it in the CAW as long as you consider the workers members of the team.

I wonder how this works for companies that sponsor multiple teams; can employees be members of multiple teams?

You didn't ask the correct question. What you asked does not even tangentially cover the situation outlined above as far as I can tell.

What should have been asked is "R12 states that 'labor provided by Team members (including sponsor employees who are members of the team)' is exempt from being included on the CAW. Is this still true if Company A is listed as a sponsor of our team, but we pay company A for both material costs and the fair market value cost of their labor to fabricate us parts?"

Originally Posted by Oblarg

At the risk of derailing the thread, I am going to opine that this is a particularly deranged rule that results in many teams having robots that other teams could not legally field even if they were able to raise the money to get the machining done, and I'd love to see it changed so that all non-COTS parts that are not manufactured in-house must include fair market price for the labor. This might necessitate raising the budget cap, but it would be far more equitable.

The entire point of the rule is clearly to encourage teams to develop ties with local businesses so they can leverage resources they otherwise wouldn't have access to.

Some regions may not have the density of machine shops that others do, but nothing is ever 100% fair.